Babylon Labs, developer of the most important BTC staking protocol, is constructing a trust-minimized Bitcoin bridge with the Cosmos community to reinforce the world’s oldest blockchain’s interoperability.
In partnership with Bitcoin builders Fiamma, Babylon is utilizing the BitVM2 computing paradigm, which is designed to permit Ethereum-style sensible contracts on Bitcoin, which then paves the best way for zero-knowledge know-how.
Zero-knowledge computations permit completely different events to confirm that info is correct with out really revealing to one another what the data is. On this sense, it’s foundational to bridging digital belongings between completely different blockchains.
Builders like Babylon Labs and Fiamma are aiming to unlock the deep wells of worth saved in BTC to finance different ecosystems and permit it to be transacted on blockchains which might be freed from a few of Bitcoin’s limitations of pace and scale.
This types a part of a broader motion to extract larger utility from Bitcoin, much like that which is commonplace on networks like Ethereum. Babylon’s Bitcoin staking protocol, which is likely one of the foremost initiatives on this sector, is billed as a method of utilizing BTC to safe different protocols and decentralized purposes and has a complete worth locked (TVL) of round $5.5 billion.
The introduction of BitVM2’s predecessor by Robin Linus in October 2023 was hailed as a breakthrough for making Bitcoin extra programmable, by means of enabling a rollup that may deal with quicker and cheaper transactions with out compromising safety. This might then permit bridges to securely switch BTC to the rollup, and later convey the BTC again in order that deposits may be withdrawn.
BitVM impressed loads of fervor amongst builders constructing initiatives on Bitcoin, together with some targeted on bridging to different networks. Zero-knowledge rollup Citrea, which is backed by Galaxy Digital, deployed a BitVM-based bridge to the Bitcoin testnet final September. It’s designed to be suitable with the Ethereum Digital Machine (EVM), the smart-contracts-executing software program that powers the Ethereum protocol.
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